NY Launch Pod: Welcome to the New York Launch Pod, the New York Press Club award winning podcast, highlighting the most interesting new startups, businesses and openings in the New York City area. I’m your host and New York attorney, Hal Coopersmith. And in this episode, Michael Chad Hoeppner founder of GK Training and Communications returns for his third appearance on the New York Launch Pod. If you’re a longtime listener, you may remember Michael is a public speaking and communications coach who started his own business and has also injected technology into communications coaching. Since we last spoke, Michael has been pivoting his business in the changing landscape of New York because of the pandemic. And in this episode, we talk about how you can adapt your business and your communication techniques. Here’s Michael:
Michael Chad Hoeppner: We can let people know here’s some simple things you can do to be more effective when communicating remotely. But the second half of the answer is we just asked people like, what is happening right now? How can we support you? How can we help you? A bunch of places? Actually, it was more about how to handle sensitive conversations and how to effectively communicate when you have to be going into terrain. That is a little bit fraught.
NY Launch Pod: But before we go to the interview, if you haven’t already remember to sign up for our monthly newsletter for unique content and insights at nylaunchpod.com and subscribe to the podcast on your favorite listening app, and we have a sponsor RezCue New York’s premier residential rental compliance platform. Have you rented out residential property in New York State? If so, odds are, you are not compliant with the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act enacted by New York State in 2019. And if you do not follow the law, your tenant may be able to legally stay in the property beyond the length of the lease. You may not be able to increase your rent by the desired amount and even more problems. RezCue is designed to solve all of that and more go to rezcueme.com and enter in some basic lease information and RezCue will take care of the rest so you can relax and be a more profitable landlord. And with that it’s time for another episode of How You Doin’.
NY Launch Pod: So you are back on the podcast. This is your third time on the New York Launch Pod. You love to speak, and that’s no coincidence because you specialize in communication. And for our listeners, we’re not necessarily going to talk about effective communication because we’ve covered that previously in episode 28 and How You Doin’ in Volume Five with Michael, we’re going to take a little bit of a different approach. And since you were doing a lot of speeches and speech communication and helping your clients through speaking, I’m more curious in terms of your business and what was your business like, and in terms of not necessarily dollars, but the structure before the pandemic.
Michael Chad Hoeppner: We were very much a model of in-person everything so that our business is split roughly between half group training and half individual coaching, all of that, or almost all of it happened in person. So you’d get pulled in for a company to do a big offsite, a thousand employees or gathering somewhere. And you have, you know, six or eight or twelve rooms going at the same time where you’re teaching some skills. On the flip side, you have individual coaching with one person who wants to get better at whatever public speaking, exuding presence, whatever it might be. All of that just stopped entirely in the span of about five days in February, of course like everyone else’s world is changed instantly and then pretty quickly it was this almost entire pivot to everything being done remotely, as we’ve all done. And, you know, that’s the first part of the answer to the question. Really it just completely changed on a dime.
NY Launch Pod: So everything was in person. What were you feeling as you saw everything begin to shut down for a business that I think is interesting because it was entirely in-person.
Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, I mean, I kind of have to separate this for a second, which is, I’ll talk about what it was like as an entrepreneur, but then I also have to bring a very clear magnifying glass to everything else in the world. It has been a crazy chaotic time. And I really do think that there are plenty of tragedies to go around. I mean, let’s face it from the last year. So it was a really tough period of time for me as it was for many people, but I am very, very aware of how much pain heartache difficulties out there. And so even though I will talk about what it was like for me as an entrepreneur, I recognize that I have one experience and there’s a lot of people who have much more dire experiences. And I know that goes without saying in a way, but it’s really true this year. So with that as a little intro, as an entrepreneur, it’s terrifying because we saw a pipeline that was for our company, a very healthy pipeline at the end of or close to the end of Q1, go to zero within literally a span of five days. We had programming for the next nine months coming up, all canceled instantly. Now we’re a pretty resilient company. We’re lucky, and that we have a lot of different clients and a lot of different industries. We teach a lot of different things and we teach them the things that are really essential. So we’re pretty resilient. But if our business saw that massive amount of shutdown, you have to wonder what are other businesses that are much more hyper-specific or local what they’re facing. So as an entrepreneur, as the founder of the company, as a CEO, I mean, it’s terrifying. I started this company the last time around, meaning I started in 2009 and 2010 when we were in the midst of the other massive economic dislocation we’ve had in the last 15 years. And so I thought, because I had grown up in that situation as an entrepreneur, I thought that I would be very prepared for this mentally and emotionally. I was a little bit, but still even knowing things like that can happen. It still took me by complete surprise and blindsided me.
NY Launch Pod: And so how did you realize what your clients needed in a post pandemic world? Because people may or may not know this, you were working with high profile CEOs, people who were doing large speaking events of their own, and those went away. So how were you able to find out what your clients required?
Michael Chad Hoeppner: Well, if there was really two things, I mean, I had a pretty strong gut instinct and I am a pretty smart person. So I give myself credit for some things, but this was not some genius insight “aha” moment, I had a hunch that people were going to need some help speaking on camera. So you can probably imagine that was not a huge leap I had to make. So that one was pretty easy. We can let people know here’s some simple things you can do to be more effective when communicating remotely. But the second half of the answer is we just asked people like, what is happening right now? How can we support you? How can we help you? A bunch of places actually, it was more about how to handle sensitive conversations and how to effectively communicate when you have to be going into terrain that is a little bit fraught. So, you know, as an example, I was working with one food and beverage company. All their salespeople had to be calling into hotels, restaurants, cafes, and they have to have conversations with food and beverage directors who are saying, are you kidding me? Why are you even calling me? There’s no one here. There’s not going to be anyone here for months and months and months leave me alone. And those were the conversations they were having. So then the pivot becomes for them, how do you become an ear, a shoulder to lean on and not necessarily be about driving sales in that particular moment? So we began doing some programming around that, around how to have these kinds of conversations in this very particular and very intense moment.
NY Launch Pod: And I know that we’re not going to talk too much about communication, but what were some of those items in order to be a shoulder to lean on?
Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, well, this is a simple one that look, this is good advice for no matter what you’re going through is just be very mindful of when you ask people an open-ended question, make sure you’re actually asking it number one and make sure you’re actually interested in the answer. So you’ve probably felt this, everyone has felt this for the last number of months. When you open up a phone conversation or a video call, and you say, how are you or how’s it going? And even as the words leave your mouth, there’s this moment in your brain when you realize, I hope their life is not a complete train wreck right now. And you feel as though maybe they’re going to talk about that or they will take it as a totally standard greeting, we all give each other and they’ll say like, good, fine. How are you? And it really becomes just a quick interchange of pleasantries. So in that moment, it actually took taking a step back and being much more methodical about what is the initial question. You’re going to ask this person to either wade into those waters or steer quite clear of them and do so either way with a tremendous amount of grace and care and intentionality.
NY Launch Pod: And what was the question that you came up with or the formula?
Michael Chad Hoeppner: It depends on the industry, but you’re going to probably make an an open-ended question, but that’s very specific. How was your week starting off? How is the beginning of your Q1, depending on who you’re talking to, what kept you busy over the weekend? It could really be anything, but you want to give it some parameters. So you actually are asking a question that you want to know the answer to. So the person feels as though you’re in a conversation, but also doesn’t leave so much latitude or demonstrate the assumption that things might be fine for them. When in all likelihood, it’s probably not fine.
NY Launch Pod: That’s the beginning of the pandemic and you address the needs of your clients. Then obviously this has gone on a long time. How are you coaching your clients in terms of the fatigue that is inevitably setting in? I don’t know that anyone wants to be on a hundred person zoom anymore or sit through multiple hour presentations.
Michael Chad Hoeppner: So as an entrepreneur, we took, I think many folks did this. Of course, we have this bit of a hiatus because business stopped effectively of any kind for about three, four weeks for many industries, it stopped for much, much more, but for my industry, that’s about what happened. And during that time we were already on this path anyway, but we continued to build out a lot of what we teach and to turn it into asynchronous, online learning. So people can do executive presence, but as opposed to a day long program, an intensive, they can do it in 14 little bite-size 15 minute lessons. So we continue to do that. Now, the reason I say that, partly an answer to your question is one of the things is we tried to give our clients access to us, but in bite sized pieces. So it’s not a half day on Zoom, but hey, if you want to get a little bit of help, a little bit of expert guidance on whatever situation you have, you can do so in 15 minutes and you can do it on your own schedule and you can do it whenever you want to. So that was one part, making everything we do online, asynchronous, et cetera. When you’re talking about how people are on video though, and the fatigue they’re experiencing, there’s a whole bunch of best practices around health and wellness that we’ve been trying to gently nudge our clients in the direction of simply because people, to your point, they’re getting really fatigued and really tired. So that exhaustion, that fatigue is real. And there are some things you can do to combat it. I’m happy to share a couple if you want, but that has been a big part of the last, you know, three or four months. How do you teach all this stuff? How do you help people? But then also how do you help them deal with being on video eight hours a day?
NY Launch Pod: Yeah, let’s share a little bit of the tidbits.
Michael Chad Hoeppner: So a couple of simple things you might notice, hey, everyone, look, I’m at a standing workstation. Whoa, I can move around the room. So if you can change your physical space, do so. And I mean multiple times per day, so don’t just stand the whole day. Don’t just sit the whole day, move a bunch. If you have a laptop, great, that gives you some mobility. Now that does make things a bit more challenging because you also want to be mindful of your background and your lighting and that sort of thing. So moving your camera and your set up of course implies that you can also have some adjustments for the physical layout that you have, but to the extent you can move, please do number two, adjust the technology to fit you, not you to fit the technology. So people tend to adjust themselves to the technology. And so if they’re using a laptop, what they do is they crane their neck forward and try to reach the microphone. And they talk a little louder than is necessary because they’re not sure if they can be heard or not. But if you talk with your head crunched over like that and trying to force as much sound into a small little microphone as you can, eight hours later, you’re exhausted. So the idea here is you should adjust the technology to fit you. Not the other way around. As your listeners have heard on the previous podcast, I’ve done our bodies, our physical communication instruments speaking as a highly physical activity. And if you’re compromising how your body works in pretty dramatic ways, and then asking it to do the job of speaking for hours and hours and hours, it gets exhausting. So be kind to your body. And then number three is give yourself a visual break in between calls and things like that. One simple thing you can do back up from the computer, put your thumbs out as far to the side, as you possibly can. And see how far back you can pull your thumbs into almost a 180 where you can still keep your thumbs in your peripheral vision. Now, what you’re doing is you’re expanding your visual plane of fields. So you’re not just staring at the camera all day long and reminding yourself, we have peripheral vision for a reason. If you don’t use it all day long, it kind of gets tired and fatigued and it goes away a little bit. So those are a couple really quick ways to think about giving yourself a reset and trying to make your day a little bit less exhausting and fatiguing.
NY Launch Pod: Well, I love the advice of adjusting the technology to fit you rather than you the technology. I have terrible posture. I’m adjusting to the technology and one of the best things that I heard, which you’re doing right now, but we’re an audio podcast is to have your camera at eye level. And that’s something that for a laptop, I even have just used a cardboard box for important presentations so that people can actually see me. And that’s a weird sensation, but it’s exactly what you’re talking about.
Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, no, this is people. This is not going to be new information to people. I’ll give you a context why we all know this. If you’re used to using a laptop, you get a lot of coaching ergonomically to keep the laptop down about like, waist level or below. So your hands are not crunched up high and tight. I’m trying to describe this visually so people can imagine it. But the idea is to avoid carpal tunnel. You want to have your wrists down a little bit. You don’t want to be staring down all the time in that small laptop. If you can, you want to bring your eye gaze up. That’s primarily for posture, but that was before we were all speaking in the cameras all day long. It’s even more so when we’re doing all this speaking, even that by itself, by the way, you express a bunch of water, a bunch of vapor when you speak all day long. So it’s even more important that people stay hydrated, drink water. It sounds very basic, right? Like you hear that an exercise class, because you’re talking into a camera all the time, you’re actually letting more vapor out as you’re doing all that then if you were just sitting there typing away doing your work. So it is, it’s a different circumstance than it used to be for sure. And it does take a different focus on health and wellness.
NY Launch Pod: So we talked about your business shifting in 2020, and one of the things that people also may not know about you, but it’s certainly public information and you’ve talked about it is that you helped a presidential candidate with his speech this past year, Andrew Yang and his communication. And I didn’t want to talk so much politics, but what I thought would be interesting just by way of example, is that the candidate was giving lots of different speeches and you have a message, but it’s a good example of having a specific message and trying to reach a broad group of people. And I feel like a lot of people in their own lives may have a message that they’re trying to, or businesses that are trying to reach a broad group of people. And what’s that process of having a message and trying to get it out to a broad group of people.
Michael Chad Hoeppner: I will answer the question as it applies to politics, but then I’ll answer it as applies to clients because there is one key difference. I would say the thing that is consistent, message discipline, meaning you want to really figure out what you want to be known for. And you want to come back to the idea over and over and over again. And the simpler you can make that usually the better. So I’ll give you a fun, little physical way to do this. You can even count out on your fingers, the number of words that are gonna convey, the big idea that you want to be known for, or that you’re trying to express or that your clients want to think about when they think of you. And if you run out of fingers, it’s probably too long. So that’s a really simple and fun and physical way to think about how can I really drill down the most basic idea that I want to share about me and my effort or my company or whatever that might be. And then
NY Launch Pod: Don’t use your toes.
Michael Chad Hoeppner: Don’t use your toes. No, absolutely not. Fingers. If you can do it on one hand, even better, I’ll give you an example of one hand, by the way, I often use this example, because I think so highly of them as a theater company, there’s a theater company in Manhattan and the Mint Theater Company is that excellent theater company. If you have an opportunity, see a play there, their mission statement is four words long, and they’re all monosyllabic words. It’s “Lost Plays Found Here”. They give little known plays their first American premiere. That’s their entire mission statement, which is fantastic. I think the same thing goes for companies. So if you can distill down that single idea you’re trying to communicate great. And then your job is to try to find how many different ways you can reinforce or share that same idea. So then how does that get into politics now? Here’s, what’s different about politics. So obviously anyone who followed Yang’s campaign knows that that message was like universal basic income. This is the animating idea, but the why behind that is much deeper than just a simple idea about how to address it. The why is looking at what is affecting and troubling our society right now, and what are innovative solutions to address it in politics. The funny thing though, is that how a news cycle unfolds. People may only see a six second snippet of something or a 15 second snippet. So even if you become a broken record on some issue, that’s actually often better because so little is actually piercing the public consciousness with all the sort of mayhem in the soundscape of our media lives. So you can have even more message discipline or, you know, if you want to put it positively, or if you want to put a negatively redundancy in politics, then you can get away with in a corporate situation or a more business situation.
NY Launch Pod: Andrew is also running for mayor in New York, which is relevant for New York City. And you talked about message discipline and piercing the consciousness of the public. Recently, he had given a quote not to pick on Andrew, but just that it’s somewhat relevant that he gave a quote to the New York Times talking about how he had two kids. And can you imagine having two kids on a virtual school and a two bedroom apartment then trying to do work yourself and not to be political here, but I wanted to bring that up in terms of communication on two fronts, maybe that was a misstep. He said that it was taken out of context. If it was a misstep, how do you avoid missteps like that? And if it is taken out of context, how do you correct something that may be taken out of context?
Michael Chad Hoeppner: A lot in that question right there. So I have to narrow it a little bit. When you say, how do you avoid that misstep? Do you mean for companies and citizens or do you mean for politicians?
NY Launch Pod: What I’m talking about is in terms of a misstep when you are speaking so broadly politicians or business leaders, and I know that you’re using a technique right now that we’ve talked about previously, by having me specify the question in terms of buying time. So now with that, I’ll let you answer the question.
Michael Chad Hoeppner: Well, to be totally blunt about that, I wasn’t actually buying time. Now, if I were here’s the good news, everyone, if you’re going to use a tactic to buy yourself time, there’s two little S’s you can think of all the time. One is sincerity and the other is specificity. And if you do it with sincerity and specificity, it doesn’t look like a ploy in this case. It wasn’t because it’s a different answer actually, depending on if it’s a citizen or a company, or if it’s a politician, it’s a slightly different answer. So let me answer the question though. If it’s something that you become aware of in the moment, you can simply deal with it with a great degree of transparency. Actually, Yang is really good at this. He’s quite unguarded and undefensive in terms of how he handles things. If he realizes he’s made a misstep, or he said something inaccurate in the moment, he’s very good at dealing with that in a very unguarded non-defensive way. But that situation you’re talking about, they do a whole interview. They go away. He probably didn’t even remember saying it. They’re going to take that whole conversation and digest it down to something. And that’s the thing that really captures the attention. So then the question becomes, okay, now that that’s happened now, how do I adjust to that situation? So that’s a multi-part answer. But the first thing is, if you know you’ve made a misstep in the moment, there’s three simple things you can do. They’re all F’s. So it’s easy to remember. You can fake it, you can feature it or you can fix it. So fake it means like, okay, I don’t think Hal noticed that I just said the wrong thing. I called him Hal Cooperswell instead of Coopersmith. So I’m just going to keep going. I’m going to fake it. All right. But if that moment is threatening to throw you off even a little bit, you can simply fix it or you can feature it. So fix it means you just address it. I’m so sorry, Hal I said that your wrong name Coopersmith of course. And you keep going or you feature it and you say, I can’t believe I said the wrong last name. This is a great point though. Folks, because in remote communication, it is so easy to have things go wrong. You’re reading the wrong name off of a slide while you’re also trying to talk into a screen, let’s talk for a moment about what you do when things go wrong. So you actually illustrate it as being a good thing. That’s very effective for politicians as well. And by the way, you know, who does that pretty darn well right now is our new president, Joe Biden. Believe it or not, people pick on his gaffes and things like that all the time. He’s very good at simply in the moment, correcting, dealing with it, handling it, moving on. And it’s not to put him on any kind of pedestal whatsoever, but just to make this real for people so they can see it in the world around them, fake it, feature, fix it. Now look, the cool thing is this. You do this anyway, you do it all the time without even thinking about it. When you’re not thinking about yourself, when you’re helping a friend, you do this automatically. So politicians can do that too. But here’s the difference. If it’s something that happened in the past and there becomes a whole controversy about it, then that’s much more about like damage control and spinning things and dealing with something after the fact. So we can talk about that too. If you want to do that next, it’s up to you. Hal you want to talk about it or not?
NY Launch Pod: Those are certainly helpful tips because if it were me, I would not sleep for a week and then think about it for a long time afterwards. And it’s certainly helpful things. Maybe since you brought it up, we can kind of finish in terms of how to maybe spin something. Once you certainly do make a mistake after you’ve maybe tried those three F techniques, or maybe you haven’t.
Michael Chad Hoeppner: Sure. So the three F techniques have to be dealt with pretty much in the moment. There are things that need to be spun and there are things that don’t need to be spun. I happen to think that the people who want to pick on like Andrew Yang’s New Yorkness and whether he belongs and if he’s a real New Yorker or not, I really think that’s a losing battle. I really do. And if you see some of what people are writing about these days saying like, why are we holding him to some sort of random arbitrary standard, but not others. So you could fight all day long about who is a real New Yorker or not. And the guy has lived here for 20 years. He knows many things about New York inside and out. And by the way, I think he’s more committed to many of the things that will affect New Yorkers every day, day to day than many of the other policies you’ll see floated around on a national or even city basis. So that’s not to get too deep into politics, but it’s to frame the idea that I don’t know that that comment really needs all that much spin. Here’s why, if you look at the comment itself in large part, it’s quite easy to say, like, was he able to do that in the pandemic? Sure. But is that the relevant issue what’s more relevant is the crises and the problems that are facing New Yorkers all the time. And the real point is not, was he able to do that? The real point is what is preventing other people from having the resources, they need to take the steps to protect their family. They need to, I mean, in this case has got a child with autism trying to take care of his family. Is it a choice that he made that came out in a certain way in the interview? But really it’s an opportunity for him over and over and over again, to focus on the other people in the five boroughs, which is what I think he is doing a pretty good job of doing, focus on all the other problems that other people have. That’s not just a lesson from politics, by the way, like people often say, couldn’t you see that giant mistake that I made on stage. It was so terrible. And I say to them, no, and no one else could either, you know why you’re talking to an audience of tremendously self-focused people, everyone. And that’s anyone you talk to. They’re thinking about themselves, their own drama, all this stuff on their own life, New Yorkers have so many stressors right now. So many things that are really affecting their life. And I think, I think Yang honestly, is the best person to try to address those crises very quickly and really innovative ways. I think the more the conversation centers on that inadvertently by focusing on this one comment, actually, it’s probably better for him.
NY Launch Pod: So in terms of helping people and New Yorkers and getting out of your own head, I know that’s certainly a focus of your company right now. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that.
Michael Chad Hoeppner: One of the really fun things about technology is you can scale it. And so all of a sudden you can clone yourself a little bit and reach a bigger audience and reach more people. I am fully aware of how fortunate and how lucky I am and my family is in this particular moment of very, very serious and dire consequences and circumstances for many people. And if we can be helpful in some way and scaling what we offer, we’re going to do that. So we have an entire library of online programming, three in particular that are the most useful right now for people. One is on email. One is on effective remote communication. And one is on presence because those are the things people are having to do all day long, right? Emails, be good on camera, and be effective when you’re remote. So those courses we are offering to anyone who has been fired or furloughed or laid off because of the pandemic. And all people have to do is email us say something that I got fired, laid off, whatever the thing might be. Can I get access to the course? And we’ll give them a login and a license to use any of those programs that they want to.
NY Launch Pod: Well, that is wonderful. And certainly during this conversation, I recognize how I can communicate better, drink more water, use technology to wrap around me rather than me towards technology. And it’s certainly wonderful that you are sharing your knowledge, which you have to presidential candidates, high power executives. How do people find out more about you and GK Training and Communications?
Michael Chad Hoeppner: All you have to go to is the URL very simple GKtraining.com. So that’s G as in genuine, K as in know-how GKtraining.com and there you’ll find all kinds of free stuff, free guided warmups, free tongue twisters, access to our free practice app called a question roulette, which is a great interactive practice app to help you speak better, totally free the generic version on both Apple and Android. And you can also, if you want to communicate with us there via social media or just reaching out to us on the website, whatever’s most convenient for you.
NY Launch Pod: Michael, it’s always an interesting conversation with you. Thank you for stepping back onto the New York Launch Pod and sharing your time with us.
Michael Chad Hoeppner: It is my pleasure. Thank you.
NY Launch Pod: And if you want to learn more about the New York Launch Pod, you can follow us on social media @nylaunchpod, or visit us at nylaunchpod.com for transcripts of every episode, including this one. And if you are a super fan, Michael, are you a super fan of the New York Launch Pod? I hope so. You’ve been on three episodes.
Michael Chad Hoeppner: I think I am Hal.
NY Launch Pod: If you’re a super fan like Michael, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It is greatly appreciated and does help people discover the show.
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